News: New route to OBE - scrambling senses with goggles and film

[Euphoric]

This isn't really drug news, so I figured this section would be best.

http://www.thestar.com/article/249415
Researchers duplicate out-of-body experience by scrambling senses with goggles and film

Aug 24, 2007 04:30 AM

You don't need to face death or force down a hallucinogenic drug to have an out-of-body experience.Scientists have come up with a way to create the sense of leaving one's body by using virtual reality goggles, video cameras and a pair of plastic sticks.

This is the first time the phenomenon has been induced in healthy people, according to the researchers, who reported their findings in a pair of studies published yesterday in the prestigious journal Science.

Creating an out-of-body experience in the laboratory can help scientists understand how a person perceives their "self" inside their body, Henrik Ehrsson, a researcher at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden and author of the first study, said at a press conference yesterday.

Ehrsson, who conducted his research at University College London, induced out-of-body experiences by intentionally scrambling a person's visual and tactile senses. Study participants sat in a chair, wearing virtual-reality goggles that showed live film taken from two video cameras placed two metres behind the chair. While a participant watched the film, essentially a view of the back of his head, Ehrsson used two plastic rods to simultaneously stroke the participant's real chest and his "virtual" chest.

All 12 participants felt as though they were sitting behind their body, looking at it from a distance.

"We are tricking the sensory organs," said Ehrsson, who also performed an experiment to test the participants' physiological response to perceived pain.

Another research team, led by Olaf Blanke, a researcher at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland, conducted a similar experiment, but used holograph-like computer simulations instead of live video.

Scientists who study out-of-body experiences hope to discover the root of self-consciousness and the relationship between the body and the self. The technique could also be used in video games or remote surgical procedures.

About one in ten people claim to have had an out-of-body experience, the researchers claim. People who have had a traumatic experience, such as a car accident, sometimes report seeing their body float away, and it is also associated with some medical conditions.

Peter Fenwick, a consultant neuropsychiatrist at London University and expert in brain function, said the studies shed little light on out-of-body experiences. He points to a Japanese study from the 1980s that is similar to Ehrsson's and Blanke's.

"If you change the apparent viewpoint of a subject and link it up to a sensory system, you can induce an out-of-body experience very easily," he said. Still, he added, the new studies confirm that the position of the body, as understood by its owner, is created within the brain.

Reputation Comments on this post:

good find

[enquirewithin]

I'd like to try that!

[OccularFantasm]

I must say that I do wonder if one would be able to figure out how to distinguish what is going on in that study. It seems if it were done with one group as they have set up already, and one group who is also taking some sort of drug to cause disorientation and perhaps confusion, and see what happens. It seems that it could be possible for the people who are confused to accept the changed more readily, or maybe it will make no difference, which would really be interesting. Also if there were different groups for confusion and disorientation, it would be interesting to see which produces a bigger change if any. Also to see if people who are just in the experiment and not taking anything to make them confused, if they could control what they see, and perhaps either see in either way they chose while under the machine things influence, or if they could block the out of body experience as they know it to be false. The difference in all these things between the different groups would lead to much more analytical information being unearthed. Also, that would be interesting to experience to compare and contrast to a standard out of body experience. Swim wonders if any of you guys have access to Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Online, because there is a related article there entitled "Threatening a rubber hand that you feel is yours elicits a cortical anxiety response" about the study described here conducted by Henrik Ehrsson. The other article with that guy and some other people I could find the full text of, but given its length I'll just post the link. http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/content/full/25/45/10564
I'll try and see if there are any updates to this to, as it seems the original studies were done in 2004, hopefully I'll get lucky and follow up studies have or are being conducted.

[Nagognog2]

NEW YORK -- Using virtual reality goggles, a camera, and a stick, scientists have induced out-of-body experiences -- the sensation of drifting outside one's body -- in healthy people, according to experiments being published in the journal Science.

When people gaze at an illusory image of themselves through the goggles and are prodded in just the right way with the stick, they feel as if they have left their bodies.

The research finds that "the sense of having a body, of being in a bodily self," is actually constructed from multiple sensory streams, said Matthew Botvinick, an assistant professor of neuroscience at Princeton University, an expert on body and mind who was not involved in the experiments.

Usually these sensory streams, which include vision, touch, balance, and the sense of where one's body is positioned in space, work together seamlessly, Botvinick said. But when the information coming from the sensory sources does not match up, when they are thrown out of synchrony, the sense of being embodied as a whole comes apart.

The brain, which abhors ambiguity, then forces a decision that can, as the new experiments show, involve the sense of being in a different body.

The research provides a physical explanation for phenomena usually ascribed to otherworldly influences, said Peter Brugger, a neurologist at University Hospital in Zurich. After severe and sudden injuries, people often report the sensation of floating over their body, looking down, hearing what is said, and then, just as suddenly, finding themselves back inside their body.

The new research is a first step in figuring out exactly how the brain creates this sensation, he said.

The out-of-body experiments were conducted by two research groups using slightly different methods intended to expand the so-called rubber hand illusion.

In that illusion, people hide one hand in their lap and look at a rubber hand that is set on a table in front of them. As a researcher strokes the real hand and the rubber hand simultaneously with a stick, people have the vivid sense that the rubber hand is their own.

When the rubber hand is whacked with a hammer, people wince and sometimes cry out.

The illusion shows that body parts can be separated from the whole body by manipulating a mismatch between touch and vision. That is, when a person's brain sees the fake hand being stroked and feels the same sensation, the sense of being touched is misattributed to the fake.

The new experiments were designed to create a whole body illusion with similar manipulations.

In Switzerland, Dr. Olaf Blanke, a neuroscientist at Ecole Polytechnique Federale in Lausanne, Switzerland, asked people to don virtual reality goggles while standing in an empty room. A camera projected an image of each person taken from the back and displayed 6 feet away. The subjects thus saw an illusory image of themselves standing in the distance.

Then Blanke stroked each person's back for one minute with a stick while simultaneously projecting the image of the stick onto the illusory image of the person's body.

When the strokes were synchronous, people reported the sensation of being momentarily within the illusory body. When the strokes were not synchronous, the illusion did not occur.

A separate set of experiments were carried out by Dr. Henrik Ehrsson, an assistant professor of neuroscience at Karolinska Institute in Helsinki.

Ehrsson asked people to sit on a chair and wear goggles connected to two video cameras placed 6 feet behind them. The left camera projected to the left eye. The right camera projected to the right eye. As a result, people saw their own backs from the perspective of a virtual person sitting behind them.

Using two sticks, Ehrsson stroked each person's chest for two minutes with one stick while moving a second stick just under the camera lenses -- as if it were touching the virtual body.

Again, when the stroking was synchronous people reported the sense of being outside their own bodies -- in this case looking at themselves from a distance where their "eyes" were located.

Then Ehrsson grabbed a hammer. While people were experiencing the illusion, he pretended to smash the virtual body by waving the hammer just below the cameras. Immediately, the subjects registered a threat response as measured by sensors on their skin.

They also reacted emotionally, as if they were watching themselves get hurt, Ehrsson said.

Reputation Comments on this post:

Interesting news.

[NeonCortex]

Isn't Karolinska Institute in Stockholm?

Very interesting research anyhow.

[Heretic.Ape.]

may want to joint with this one nag News: New route to OBE

[Nagognog2]

Seems to be rather different studies. Tough call. But I'll leave 'em to stand on their own. Thanks anywho.

[lulz]

I applaud the creativity of the scientist in charge of this experiment.

It seems to reinforce a personal long-held conviction that psychedelic drugs don't open the mind itself, rather they open the mind to experiencing the body... which is a bit recursive, because our bodies evolved a conscious mind in order to regulate the body itself.

Blame Descartes.

From The Joyous Cosmology - Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness by Alan Watts:

Slowly it becomes clear that one of the greatest of all superstitions is the separation of the mind from the body. This does not mean that we are being forced to admit that we are only bodies; it means that we are forming an altogether new idea of the body. For the body considered as separate from the mind is one thing—an animated corpse. But the body considered as inseparable from the mind is another, and as yet we have no proper word for a reality which is simultaneously mental and physical. To call it mental-physical will not do at all, for this is the very unsatisfactory joining of two concepts which have both been impoverished by long separation and opposition. But we are at least within sight of being able to discard altogether ideas of a stuff which is mental and a stuff which is material. "Stuff" is a word which describes the formless mush that we perceive when sense is not keen enough to make out its pattern. The notion of material or mental stuff is based on the false analogy that trees are made of wood, mountains of stone, and minds of spirit in the same way that pots are made of clay. "Inert" matter seems to require an external and intelligent energy to give it form. But now we know that matter is not inert. Whether it is organic or inorganic, we are learning to see matter as patterns of energy—not of energy as if energy were a stuff, but as energetic pattern, moving order, active intelligence.

The realization that mind and body, form and matter, are one is blocked, however, by ages of semantic confusion and psychological prejudice. For it is common sense that every pattern, shape, or structure is a form of something as pots are forms of clay. It is hard to see that this "something" is as dispensable as the ether in which light was once supposed to travel, or as the fabulous tortoise upon which the earth was once thought to be supported. Anyone who can really grasp this point will experience a curiously exhilarating liberation, for the burden of stuff will drop from him and he will walk less heavily.

The dualism of mind and body arose, perhaps, as a clumsy way of describing the power of an intelligent organism to control itself. It seemed reasonable to think of the part controlled as one thing and the part controlling as another. In this way the conscious will was opposed to the involuntary appetites and reason to instinct. In due course we learned to center our identity, our selfhood, in the controlling part—the mind—and increasingly to disown as a mere vehicle the part controlled. It thus escaped our attention that the organism as a whole, largely unconscious, was using consciousness and reason to inform and control itself. We thought of our conscious intelligence as descending from a higher realm to take possession of a physical vehicle. We therefore failed to see it as an operation of the same formative process as the structure of nerves, muscles, veins, and bones—a structure so subtly ordered (that is, intelligent) that conscious thought is as yet far from being able to describe it.

Read the full book here: http://www.druglibrary.org/SCHAFFER/lsd/jccontnt.htm